Saturday, April 23, 2011

Guangdong

Guangdong (simplified Chinese: 广东省; traditional Chinese: 廣東省) is a province on the southern coast of People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province. It surpassed Henan and Sichuan to become the most populous province in China in January 2005, registering 79 million permanent residents and 31 million migrants who lived in the province for at least six months of the year, The provincial capital Guangzhou and economic hub Shenzhen are amongst the most populous and important cities in China.

Guangdong is China's richest province, with Jiangsu and Shandong in 2nd and 3rd in rank; its GDP has topped the rankings since 1989 amongst all provincial-level divisions. According to provincial annual preliminary statistics, Guangdong's GDP in 2009 reached CNY3,908,159 million, or US$572,121 million, making its economy roughly the same size as that of Turkey or Indonesia. The Guangdong province has the third highest GDP per capita in China, after Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.

This is a trend of official estimates of the gross domestic product of the Province of Guangdong with figures in millions of Chinese Yuan:

After the communist takeover and until the start of the Deng Xiaoping reforms in 1978, Guangdong was an economic backwater, although a large underground, service-based economy has always existed. Economic development policies encouraged industrial development in the interior provinces which were weakly joined to Guangdong via transportation links. The government policy of economic autarchy made Guangdong's access to the ocean irrelevant